Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday August 05, 2013 @04:22PM
from the happy-marsday dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Curiosity rover celebrates one year on Mars today. 'The 1-ton robot has achieved a great deal in its 12 months on Mars, discovering an ancient streambed and gathering enough evidence for mission scientists to declare that the planet could have supported microbial life billions of years ago. And more big finds could be in the offing, as Curiosity is now trekking toward its ultimate science destination: the foothills of a huge and mysterious mountain that preserves, in its many layers, a history of Mars' changing environmental conditions.'"

If you read the TFA, they say this is likely a mountain entirely built up by wind-borne sediment. Assuming they can access various layers of sediment, then yes, it's possible. Even still, the walls of a deep crater do sound like a better candidate to examine rock strata.

In otherowrds, there's tons of better ways to spend all the billions injected into this project.

Such as war.US defense budget for 2012: $1.030–$1.415 trillion (wikipedia)NASA budget for 2012: 18.724 billion (wikipedia)I don't have an exact number, but the Curiosity rover cost about 1.5 billion dollars. I don't know if that is just the rover itself, or the whole operation.

Was it worth it? Well, just like all government programs intended to employ people, you might judge that the number of people employed vs the money spent.

Basically MSL (aka Curiosity) was the full-employment program for JPL contractors. While everything else was being cut, all the contractors and JPL employees tried to bill as much as possible to this program to avoid redundancies (layoffs). Sadly, these kind of employees tend to be attached to expensive toys which makes the for lower efficiency when judged by the $/employed metric.

FWIW, they at least managed to land to rover on the (martian) ground. In that sense, it probably was better spent than the billons we spend on other employment programs which simply return only employment, or fund things that are actually unused (like bridges to nowhere, or airports with no scheduled flights) or actually unwanted (e.g, F35, MEADS, EFV).

Well, just like all government programs intended to employ people, you might judge that the number of people employed vs the money spent.

Or judge it by the amazing quantity of good science it's done and the awe inspiring awesomeness of the whole thing. It's a 1 ton robot lowered by a sky crane onto another planet doing science! If you only judge such things by financial metrics then the world looks unbearable grey and dull.

Many people mistake science and technology. *** Sure it was an amazing technical feat of engineering to land something on another planet, but that's not science. Of course there was science too, but that's not what tickles the crowd (yes we're pretty sure there was water on mars is the basic theory we are testing with MSL).

Just like the hoover dam (or the 3 gorges dam) or the various bridges or tall buildings are marvels of technology, and we can choose to spend our money on all sorts of wonder

It's impossible to know the future value of a project like Curiosity. It would have been like trying to calculate the value of those Apollo mirrors and the extra fuel required to carry them to the surface of the moon back in the 1960s, without any knowledge of how they would be used into the next millennium. Now we use them to assist with climate and ocean models based on the movement and gravitational effects of the moon, for example. I don't know how you even begin to calculate how valuable those are to t

I don't think so. In otherowrds, there's tons of better ways to spend all the billions injected into this project.

Yes, the better ways seem to be blowing people up, monitoring their communications, and incarcerating the perpetrators of victimless crimes... essentially state sponsored terrorism. Wouldn't want to give any of that money to fund science when we can use it bash peoples heads in, right?

In otherowrds, there's tons of better ways to spend all the billions injected into this project.

Yeah, we would probably be better off spending that $2.5 billion on another 8 or 9 days in Afghanistan (at the low, low price of just $300 million per day).

Haha, no, I'm only kidding. Only a complete idiot would think that $2.5 billion (which represents 0.06% of the US federal budget for FY 2013) to send an entire science laboratory to another planet is a waste of money. This country is full of money wasters, ground-breaking science missions are not part of those. Look at the defense budget if you want to talk about trimming the fat, not the science budget. The NSA in particular seems to have quite a lot of money that it doesn't need (or shouldn't be using).

It was worth it because the technologies used in this project can be used in other forays into space. Not to mention they can actually deliver computer service packs all the way to Mars. There are people and companies that cannot even install service packs on their local network without breaking a bunch of shit.

Our clocks tick ever so slower than Mars, but only by a negligible amount in terms of counting birthdays. IIRC from a default frame of reference, a clock in a gravitational field will tick slower as the gravitational field increases in strength. And we have Mars beat pretty well in terms of gravity.

They still haven't made it to Mount Sharp? Holy crap, that was their destination from the moment it landed! Apparently, it's only traveled half a mile in a year and its destination is only 5 miles away. And this will take another 9-12 months with sidetrips?